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An obvious linguistic misfortune. But that is what happens when you let physicists name some of the most fascinating possibilities of the universe. According to general relativity, they tell us, widely separated pieces of space-time occasionally rub up against each other. This allows a “wormhole” to form which would enable - still theoretically - instant movement between these seemingly vastly distant points in space-time. I love the idea, I hate the name. Let us use “portal" instead. And now let me try to explain why I think that what we call love is just such a portal.
My nighttime meditation ritual combines meditation and Reiki. After arranging my side of the bed for maximum sleeping comfort, I slip on my headphones and select the musical background for my half-hour or so “on-myself Reiki session.” I use Pandora. Sometimes I go for a purely instrumental playlists, but other times I listen to playlists that include vocals, which are, if we stop and think about it, simply poetry set to music. It is probably no exaggeration to say that more than 95 percent of the songs that pop up on these playlists are love songs. They are poems about finding love, losing love, looking for love, being in love, loving a certain woman, loving a certain man, loving a prophet from a particular faith, loving God, loving your car for crying out loud. You name it and there are love songs to celebrate the relationship.
This poetic obsession with love always leaves me wondering just what it is we, or they, are talking about. I mean really, “Love. It’s what makes a Subaru a Subaru?” What am I missing here? I often think of the quote from the old TV show Family Ties when Alex [Michael J. Fox] struggles to tell his Mom about falling in love with a classmate: “Love, Mom? Gee, I don’t know if I’ve ever been in love. I loved that puppy we got when I was six. But this is completely different.” Are all those love songs about "something completely different?” I’m not sure. Songs from the mid-60s will trigger the Alex-like emotions from those heady teenage days when I found myself “in love," for the first time, somewhere I had never been before. But then a John Denver or James Taylor poem can mirror those same emotions in a very non-human context - love of places and spaces. Sacred music from a variety of faiths can call up a deep feeling of an expansive harmony. And that is where I usually end up - at the intersection of what we call love, and the world view I call Distilled Harmony.
Distilled Harmony grows from string theory which posits a universe constructed at its most fundamental level from infinitesimal tiny vibrating strings. Distilled Harmony, as articulated in my book, The God Chord: String Theory in the Landscape of the Heart, goes on to assert that we are each, molecule, mouse, mountain, Mars, galaxies, suns, black holes, literally made of music, constructed of the billions and billions of tiny vibrating strings demanded by string theory. It is not a great stretch to assume that what some folks have come to call the music of the spheres, is a shared harmony articulated by the strings that underlie all existence.
Most faiths and philosophies share a couple of underlying principles that then tend to get lost when the politics of dueling prophets bloody the scene - the whole distasteful "my God is better than your God" absurdity. Strip that foolishness away you will usually find a couple consistencies. First, there is an individual component - the soul or the self. Second there is a universal component in which the individual component experiences the universal - hears the music of the spheres. Some belief systems demand that you die before you get to the second phase. I have never been comfortable with that - nobody is going to convince me to drink the Kool Aid to get to the mothership.
Distilled Harmony has much more in common with those belief systems that assert that via focused reflection, or meditation, or prayer, or music, or dance, the individual can glimpse - and experience for a while - the universal. And it is here that love plays a major role. You see? You thought I’d never get back to love, right?
Distilled Harmony asserts that we find a state of grace when our own individual chord [the tiny vibrating strings that make up every part of us] sounds in harmony with the omnipresent chord of the universe. Grace is a state when we are in harmony with the overarching vibrations of the universe - that point where science, faith, and philosophy merge in a single harmonic reality. As I mentioned above, there are probably a number of routes to that unity. Oftentimes the path is arduous and time-consuming and the temptation to seek shortcuts beckons a siren song. This gives charlatans of every stripe the opportunity to beguile the unsuspecting with quick fixes - chemical, mystical or military. Distilled Harmony advocates a better way to glimpse the universal, and it is there in all those poems, in all those love songs.
Love is the portal that takes us from wherever we are to a state of grace, ignoring all the laws of time and space, the quarrels among conflicting philosophies, faiths and theologies. That is why we write about it over and over in our poetic love songs, why we seek it so, agonize so when we lose it, want so desperately to make it for forever; ’til death do us part, for ever and ever amen. Would that it were always so. Love, aka grace, is all around us, all the time, but the “necessities" of life often distract us from experiencing grace. In the 1989 Peter Weir film Dead Poets Society, Mr. Keating says “. . . medicine, law, business, engineering, are noble pursuits, and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.” Wise words often overlooked in our currently STEM-obsessed world.
Love is like a sunrise and a sunset. Awesome, shimmering, but transient, always shifting. We pay it homage through the arts, but those attempts to pin it down it are artifice. We make our encounters with love more probable, more long-lasting, by the way we live our lives. It comes as no surprise to you that I advocate that we Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity and Oppose Harm.
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